Democrats attack Vance for supporting marriage

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) believes marriage is good. He believes it is good not just for married couples, not just for the children of married parents, but for all the children in a community.

That is the stunning finding of in-depth reporting by the New York Times on an introduction Vance wrote for a think tank report in 2017.

“Every year, The Heritage Foundation publishes a collection of data, charts, and thoughtful contextual pieces under the heading Index of Culture and Opportunity,” Vance wrote in the document's 2017 introduction.

“Its title is a nod to something often lost in our politics these days: that culture and opportunity are linked together, that the opportunities that exist in our society and our citizens’ perceptions of those opportunities shape our shared culture, and that our culture in turn shapes the opportunities available to individuals and communities," he said.

The New York Times describes the 2017 document as “an effort to instruct Americans on what their families should be, when to grow them and the best way to raise their children,” adding that the report says two-parent married households are "the ‘ideal’ environment for raising children."

And the report does, in fact, argue that the two-parent married household is the ideal environment for raising children. It even contains a footnote substantiating this claim, linking to research published by the Brookings Institution and Princeton University . Does the New York Times question this research? It doesn’t say.

Vance’s introduction goes on to quote the work of Harvard professor Raj Chetty, who found that the percentage of children who end up outearning their parents has fallen in recent decades. In other words, Vance is correctly noting that the American dream is dying.

But Chetty also found that the dream is not dying for everyone in America. There are some communities where economic mobility continues to occur. The New York Times then quotes Vance’s introduction: “Two of the biggest factors driving regional differences in upward mobility are the prevalence of single-parent families and concentrated poverty, indicating that both family and neighborhood structure matter in the lives of our nation’s working class.”

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And it is true — that is what Chetty found. The higher the percentage of single-parent families in a neighborhood, the less upwardly mobile children, especially boys, were. Does the New York Times dispute this research? Because the newspaper has actually reported on it in the past .

We understand that the New York Times is obsessed with promoting alternative lifestyles contradictory to monogamous marriage , which is why it takes such offense at Republicans like Vance “seeking to instruct Americans on how to raise children.” But the reality is that Vance is right: Monogamous marriage is the “ideal” environment for raising children, no matter how much New York Times editors may not wish it so.